i've never heard a cd that i enjoyed listening to , too bright,too dominating ,ear piercing and fatiguing ! i've never heard a waveguide/seos mounted cd either though ! if sound quality is a priority but domes/ribbons do not have the spl required ,what are the options ? donc
When I first got the 18's/ba750's I set them up actively piggybacked onto some JBL LSR-32's. No contest, even at lower SPL's the seos' are much cleaner when A/B'd. At higher SPL's there is really no contest. Those domes sound cloudy and contaminated in comparison... But the WG's have a very different power response and you have to voice your speaker accordingly. IE all the kits are really designed for off-axis listening, if you ignore that they would all be too bright for my taste, at least from what I've seen from the measurements. That would make them fatiguing especially at sustained higher SPL's, but that would really be user error more so than a problem with the CD/WG. Were you looking at the kits or doing a build?
Sounds like you've heard bad implementation of CDs. Which, there's a lot of examples of. Compression drivers often have wild impedance curves and wild frequency response. They're also commonly used in pro audio applications. What happens is the speaker is designed for max spl and so lumpy frequency response is favoured for it's high output. And cross overs are high to give better power handling. Sometimes it's even worse and someone will put a smiley face on the eq. Often as well, the horn is SQ compromised to give higher SPL over smooth frequency response. So the horn adds diffraction (honk). All in all, there's a lot of bad implementation out there. Perhaps it's not the case, but I wouldn't doubt if the bad flavour of CDs is because you haven't heard a good design. They're not easy to get right, and a text book cross over will defintely yield very bad results. With a dome, most often you'll get something fairly reasonable just for trying. As for "what are the options". Well, line array maybe. I don't know much about those. Waveguide on a dome is another option. Finding one that'll work will be tough. I know the SB29 mates well with the Dayton 8" round waveguide to boost sensitivity a little. You'll get around 94db in the top octave and over 100db around 1500hz. That's the best dome option I've ever used. There's planers like the Beyma TPL150 (think that's it) or the CSS Planer 2. Those are horn loaded and make quite a bit of SPL. But the horns are somewhat small so directivity will be tough to match to a large woofer. In a three way with a smaller mid they could work. Probably some other options as well. Some large ribbons are fairly high sensitivity. Good luck.